6,528 research outputs found
Recommended from our members
Computerization of workflows, guidelines and care pathways: a review of implementation challenges for process-oriented health information systems
There is a need to integrate the various theoretical frameworks and formalisms for modeling clinical guidelines, workflows, and pathways, in order to move beyond providing support for individual clinical decisions and toward the provision of process-oriented, patient-centered, health information systems (HIS). In this review, we analyze the challenges in developing process-oriented HIS that formally model guidelines, workflows, and care pathways. A qualitative meta-synthesis was performed on studies published in English between 1995 and 2010 that addressed the modeling process and reported the exposition of a new methodology, model, system implementation, or system architecture. Thematic analysis, principal component analysis (PCA) and data visualisation techniques were used to identify and cluster the underlying implementation ‘challenge’ themes. One hundred and eight relevant studies were selected for review. Twenty-five underlying ‘challenge’ themes were identified. These were clustered into 10 distinct groups, from which a conceptual model of the implementation process was developed. We found that the development of systems supporting individual clinical decisions is evolving toward the implementation of adaptable care pathways on the semantic web, incorporating formal, clinical, and organizational ontologies, and the use of workflow management systems. These architectures now need to be implemented and evaluated on a wider scale within clinical settings
Employment Action Plan : 2002
"The UK Employment Action Plan 2002 was produced after extensive consultation and agreement across Government Departments and agencies responsible for the employment,
economic and social fields. Beyond Government, the production of the Plan involves a wide range of stakeholders. This year the main external partners were the CBI, TUC, CEEP UK and the Regional Development Agencies (the main strategic coordinators of local activity in
England). The Devolved Administrations of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales have made their own separate contributions" -- page 3
Genetic embedded matching approach to ground states in continuous-spin systems
Due to an extremely rugged structure of the free energy landscape, the
determination of spin-glass ground states is among the hardest known
optimization problems, found to be NP-hard in the most general case. Owing to
the specific structure of local (free) energy minima, general-purpose
optimization strategies perform relatively poorly on these problems, and a
number of specially tailored optimization techniques have been developed in
particular for the Ising spin glass and similar discrete systems. Here, an
efficient optimization heuristic for the much less discussed case of continuous
spins is introduced, based on the combination of an embedding of Ising spins
into the continuous rotators and an appropriate variant of a genetic algorithm.
Statistical techniques for insuring high reliability in finding (numerically)
exact ground states are discussed, and the method is benchmarked against the
simulated annealing approach.Comment: 17 pages, 12 figures, 1 tabl
Automatically Restructuring Practice Guidelines using the GEM DTD
This paper describes a system capable of semi-automatically filling an XML
template from free texts in the clinical domain (practice guidelines). The XML
template includes semantic information not explicitly encoded in the text
(pairs of conditions and actions/recommendations). Therefore, there is a need
to compute the exact scope of conditions over text sequences expressing the
required actions. We present a system developed for this task. We show that it
yields good performance when applied to the analysis of French practice
guidelines
Leveraging workflow control patterns in the domain of clinical practice guidelines
Background:
Clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) include recommendations describing appropriate care for the management of patients with a specific clinical condition. A number of representation languages have been developed to support executable CPGs, with associated authoring/editing tools. Even with tool assistance, authoring of CPG models is a labor-intensive task. We aim at facilitating the early stages of CPG modeling task. In
this context, we propose to support the authoring of CPG models based on a set of suitable procedural patterns described in an implementation-independent notation that can be then semi-automatically transformed into one of the alternative executable CPG languages.
Methods:
We have started with the workflow control patterns which have been identified in the fields of workflow systems and business process management. We have analyzed the suitability of these patterns by means of a qualitative analysis of CPG texts. Following our analysis we have implemented a selection of workflow patterns in the Asbru and PROforma CPG languages. As implementation-independent notation for the description of patterns we have chosen BPMN 2.0. Finally, we have developed XSLT transformations to convert the BPMN 2.0 version of the patterns into the Asbru and PROforma languages.
Results:
We showed that although a significant number of workflow control patterns are suitable to describe CPG procedural knowledge, not all of them are applicable in the context of CPGs due to their focus on single-patient care. Moreover, CPGs may require additional patterns not included in the set of workflow control patterns. We also showed that nearly all the CPG-suitable patterns can be conveniently implemented in the Asbru and PROforma languages. Finally, we demonstrated that individual patterns can be semi-automatically transformed from a process specification in BPMN 2.0 to executable implementations in these languages.
Conclusions:
We propose a pattern and transformation-based approach for the development of CPG models. Such an approach can form the basis of a valid framework for the authoring of CPG models. The identification of adequate patterns and the implementation of transformations to convert patterns from a process specification into different executable implementations are the first necessary steps for our approach.This research has been supported by:
1) Austrian Science Fund (FWF) through project TRP71-N23.
2) Spanish Ministry of Education through grant PR2010-0279, and by Universitat Jaume I through project P11B2009-38
Preparing HPC Applications for the Exascale Era: A Decoupling Strategy
Production-quality parallel applications are often a mixture of diverse
operations, such as computation- and communication-intensive, regular and
irregular, tightly coupled and loosely linked operations. In conventional
construction of parallel applications, each process performs all the
operations, which might result inefficient and seriously limit scalability,
especially at large scale. We propose a decoupling strategy to improve the
scalability of applications running on large-scale systems.
Our strategy separates application operations onto groups of processes and
enables a dataflow processing paradigm among the groups. This mechanism is
effective in reducing the impact of load imbalance and increases the parallel
efficiency by pipelining multiple operations. We provide a proof-of-concept
implementation using MPI, the de-facto programming system on current
supercomputers. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this strategy by decoupling
the reduce, particle communication, halo exchange and I/O operations in a set
of scientific and data-analytics applications. A performance evaluation on
8,192 processes of a Cray XC40 supercomputer shows that the proposed approach
can achieve up to 4x performance improvement.Comment: The 46th International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP-2017
Effectiveness and cost effectiveness of pharmacist input at the ward level: a systematic review and meta-analysis
Background Pharmacists play important role in ensuring timely care delivery at the ward level. The optimal level of pharmacist input, however, is not clearly defined. Objective To systematically review the evidence that assessed the outcomes of ward pharmacist input for people admitted with acute or emergent illness. Methods The protocol and search strategies were developed with input from clinicians. Medline, EMBASE, Centre for Reviews and Dissemination, The Cochrane Library, NHS Economic Evaluations, Health Technology Assessment and Health Economic Evaluations databases were searched. Inclusion criteria specified the population as adults and young people (age >16 years) who are admitted to hospital with suspected or confirmed acute or emergent illness. Only randomised controlled trials (RCTs) published in English were eligible for inclusion in the effectiveness review. Economic studies were limited to full economic evaluations and comparative cost analysis. Included studies were quality-assessed. Data were extracted, summarised. and meta-analysed, where appropriate. Results Eighteen RCTs and 7 economic studies were included. The RCTs were from USA (n=3), Sweden (n=2), Belgium (n=2), China (n=2), Australia (n=2), Denmark (n=2), Northern Ireland, Norway, Canada, UK and Netherlands. The economic studies were from UK (n=2), Sweden (n=2), Belgium and Netherlands. The results showed that regular pharmacist input was most cost effective. It reduced length-of-stay (mean= -1.74 days [95% CI: -2.76, -0.72], and increased patient and/or carer satisfaction (Relative Risk (RR) =1.49 [1.09, 2.03] at discharge). At £20,000 per quality-adjusted life-year (QALY)-gained cost-effectiveness threshold, it was either cost-saving or cost-effective (Incremental Cost Effectiveness Ratio (ICER) =£632/ QALY-gained). No evidence was found for 7-day pharmacist presence. Conclusions Pharmacist inclusion in the ward multidisciplinary team improves patient safety and satisfaction and is cost-effective when regularly provided throughout the ward stay. Research is needed to determine whether the provision of 7-day service is cost-effective.Peer reviewe
Analyzing the Scope of Conditions in Texts: A Discourse-Based Approach
International audienceThis paper focuses on the task that consists in automatically structuring free texts according to semantic principles, hence requiring a discourse analysis. We show that the task can be rephrased as a machine learning task in which the algorithm is supposed to take an optimal decision from the range of complex interacting constraints. The approach is implemented and evaluated taking the example of Health Practices Guidelines, medium-size documents intended to describe common practices that should be followed by physicians. Our approach outperforms previous approaches limited to sentence boundaries or requiring a lot of manual work
Benchmarking Distributed Stream Data Processing Systems
The need for scalable and efficient stream analysis has led to the
development of many open-source streaming data processing systems (SDPSs) with
highly diverging capabilities and performance characteristics. While first
initiatives try to compare the systems for simple workloads, there is a clear
gap of detailed analyses of the systems' performance characteristics. In this
paper, we propose a framework for benchmarking distributed stream processing
engines. We use our suite to evaluate the performance of three widely used
SDPSs in detail, namely Apache Storm, Apache Spark, and Apache Flink. Our
evaluation focuses in particular on measuring the throughput and latency of
windowed operations, which are the basic type of operations in stream
analytics. For this benchmark, we design workloads based on real-life,
industrial use-cases inspired by the online gaming industry. The contribution
of our work is threefold. First, we give a definition of latency and throughput
for stateful operators. Second, we carefully separate the system under test and
driver, in order to correctly represent the open world model of typical stream
processing deployments and can, therefore, measure system performance under
realistic conditions. Third, we build the first benchmarking framework to
define and test the sustainable performance of streaming systems.
Our detailed evaluation highlights the individual characteristics and
use-cases of each system.Comment: Published at ICDE 201
- …